Digital housekeeping: Living with data

Introduction

Digital files, folders, applications and other forms of data have now become part of our everyday life. As Lyman and Varian (2000, 2003) predicted at the turn of the century, ¹ we now live with a range of digital data which sits across our home computers, work laptops, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions and other devices. Digital data also come in various forms, be it in message and attachments in our email inbox, lists of activity and searches on Facebook, digital family photographs that fill up our hard drives and smartphone galleries, old apps with data stored on our phones or Microsoft Word documents left on our home laptop while working from home. As a range of scholars have noted, the increased presence of data in our everyday lives has a range of implications. For example, the content of the data stored on our devices raises concerns about where, how and for how long we store digital data. Anxieties about privacy, data security and the potential for exploitation by individuals (Hargittai and Marwick, 2016; Marwick, 2017) or corporations (Andrejevic et al., 2015) inform decisions about how to manage the digital traces in our lives. Reflecting upon the growth of Big Data, Deborah Lupton (2017, 2018) has argued that personal data can be interpreted in different ways. As she describes,

Personal data, in other words, can be viewed as a new type of human remains, one that is potentially open to a multitude of repurposing and reconfiguring, leading to many kinds of value for a diverse range of actors. (Lupton, 2018: 6)

The rise of digital media platform ownership by corporations such as Google and Facebook and the broader commodification of data in contemporary capitalism have introduced a range of new actors that are interested in the digital data we produce. Data have, in many ways, become the new currency for corporate and other interests. Our digital data, and the range of actors that are intentionally or unintentionally implicated in the regimes of value around digital data (Appadurai, 1988; Keane, 2001, 2008; Myers, 2001), are multivalent and determined relationally to these different actors and interests. As Appadurai (1988) suggests for commodities more generally, ‘As commodities travel greater distances (institutional, spatial, temporal), knowledge about them tends to become partial, contradictory and differentiated. But such differentiation may itself . . . lead to the intensification of demand’ (p. 56). As we demonstrate throughout this article, awareness of these different regimes shapes our orientation towards technological ‘solutions’ and, in turn, the practices we engage in by automatically syncing our data in ‘the cloud’ (Jackson et al., 2007; Pickren, 2018) or the use of multiple devices or a range of software and hardware designed to help manage our digital data.

This article builds upon a growing body of work by social scientists as well as media, communication and informatics scholars on the implications of digital data assemblages (Lupton, 2018) in our lives and the awareness of the different regimes of value that influence our desire to share, store or shed our digital data. It does so by focusing less on the individual interpretations of the content of digital data (Beer and Burrows, 2013; Lupton, 2016, 2018) and instead attends to the mundane ways which we interact with and manage digital data in our everyday lives in the household. Through the concept of ‘digital housekeeping’, we argue that one of the challenges of data for issues of privacy as well as our (and others’) ability to extract meaning and value out of data is tied to the mess of living with digital data. For this research, we focus upon the ways that people manage and make sense of the plethora of digital material in their lives, and specifically, in the context of families and domestic spaces. To develop this argument, we draw upon 3 years research conducted between 2015 and 2017 in 12 households in Melbourne, Australia, one of Australia’s most cosmopolitan and multicultural cities, where the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN) was near completion. The NBN in its original incarnation promised to provide faster, more accessible WiFi in Australia’s urban centres like Melbourne as well as to regions previously undersupplied. This national strategy influenced the affordability and uptake of broadband WiFi within households. ² The findings presented in this article were based on fieldwork conducted in Melbourne with 25 research participants, where time was spent in 11 households, and in-depth interviews were conducted with family members. Members of households who were interviewed were between 19 and 73 years old, 12 were male and 13 were female. A total of 17 participants held regular, relatively well-paying jobs (9 males, 8 females), 4 were retired (3 males, 1 female) and 2 were students (female). Out of these 11 households who participated in the entire duration of the study, 4 households were comprised of parents and children below the age of 18, one comprised of a couple and a child above 18, one was composed of a single father and a child above 18 and one household comprised of a same-sex couple (female). We focused upon locative media practices across generations and where possible, we included families where three generations were actively involved in the weekly routines of households. This article focuses upon four key households. The first, the Menon–Taylor household, the second, the Victor household, the third, the Chan household and the fourth, the Harrison household.

The material presented in this article was gathered during multiple 2- to 4-hour household visits spread across 2015 and 2016. The first visit involved a tour of the house where general discussions about participants’ use of mobile and locative media were collected and used the video re-enactments of daily digital routines developed from Pink et al. (2016; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2014). These materials were then transcribed and uploaded into NVivo for coding and analysis. In this first stage of analysis, two key issues – privacy and data management – were identified for follow-up visits with each family. We then developed a supplemental set of semi-structured interview questions and an object-led interview (Horst and Taylor, 2014; Ito et al., 2009). In the latter, we sat down with members of the household and asked them to show us where and how they stored digital data. This often included visits to offices, living rooms and closets where objects such as DVDs, computers and back up servers were stored. It also encompassed sitting in front of a computer talking with participants about how they organised their computer files, clicking on folders and reflecting upon what was in each folder and how it had changed over time. These were driven by the circumstances of the individuals interviewed.

This article examines three core practices of sharing and storing digital data that emerged through our work with families in Melbourne: tidying, spring cleaning and moving house. Our analysis draws upon a wider body of work in material culture studies that attends to ‘the processes of materialization’ which as Victor Buchli (2002) has argued ‘are more significant than materiality itself and in fact variable constitutive of it – material culture itself is just a peculiar moment in these processes’ (p. 16). Through fine-grained attention to the ways in which households sift through and sort their digital data (and associated forms of material culture), this article encourages us to reflect upon the consequences of digital memory and the capacity to store for our relationships with digital data.

Everyday digital data

While Big Data refers to data collected, stored and interpreted about large populations, small data concerns individuals (Lupton, 2018: 1). Literature in critical data studies emphasises the complexities and power relations surrounding for whom personal data can become valuable. These approaches draw attention to the ways in which data in its sciences and infrastructures are informed by particular histories, ideologies and philosophies that typically remain hidden (Iliadis and Russo, 2016: 2). Dalton et al. (2016) argue the need to develop theoretical and empirical approaches towards thinking about data that are nuanced and contingent, situated in political historical and geographical contexts to avoid overly positivist and deterministic readings that view data simply as an outcome of technological processes. Other studies emphasise the processes and infrastructures that support the ways data are collected, stored and shared among commercial third parties on a large scale (Furlong, 2011; Pickren, 2018). Pickren (2018) draws attention to data flows in relation to infrastructures that reconfigure landscapes and political interests within communities. He argues that infrastructures of data centres, fibre optic cables, routers and telecommunication towers that power the transmission of digital data are also central to understanding the production of everyday life (Pickren, 2018: 226, 229).

While the emerging field of critical data studies incorporates research that rejects depoliticised data generated and curated from large scale sets, this article brings to the fore the ways in which data generate value and is valued within the everyday socialities of the household. We argue that the interplay between material and immaterial infrastructures shapes the nature of data storage, circulation and meaning making within the home by drawing attention to the immaterial infrastructures such as the social relationships, emotional connections, individual and collective imaginations and other forms of obligation that shape how we produce and experience digital data. The examples that follow illustrate that, similar to mobile media use, digital data are also embedded within the context of often emotional-laden family relationships and interactions (Clark, 2014). The way labour is performed within the household around organising data, untangling its messiness in order access it and make sense of it into the future is important to our perspective of how data represent meanings and value within these smaller scale interpersonal relationships.

Throughout this article, digital housekeeping is focused upon the small, routine tasks associated with maintaining digital technologies such as computers and mobile phones rather than recent work in HCI and other contexts focused upon domestic appliances, robotic vacuum cleaners and smart homes (e.g. Sertã et al., 2019; Strengers, 2019). ‘Digital housekeeping’ thus refers to the small, routine tasks associated with the set-up, placement and maintenance of networked technologies to keep them operating smoothly as part of household routines at a moment where networked infrastructure was becoming integrated into households. Grinter et al. (2005) pay close attention to how labour is invested in the incorporation of these technologies into everyday life: whether they require regular attention, or they are only maintained once they experience some kind of breakdown. Focusing upon the design process, Tolmie et al. (2007) argue that digital housekeeping is a form of labour that seeks to understand how households ‘work to make the home network work’.

We also build upon recent work in human computer interaction (HCI) and other areas that the gendered domestic labour around managing and maintaining domestic technologies (Sertã et al., 2019). For example, Kennedy et al.’s (2015) framework extends the notion of digital housekeeping to consider how labour in relation to digital technologies can also be a form of expertise that is unevenly distributed in the home. They draw on fieldwork conducted in Melbourne, Australia in an earlier moment of the availability of highspeed broadband (when these services and units were more expensive and were not solely dependent on WiFi infrastructure implemented by the Australian government). They focus upon various forms of digital housework including managing digital configurations in the home and the ways in which expertise and time are valued differently by members of households. In contrast to more ‘traditional’ forms of housework, they observe that digital housework is most often performed by men, but this trend reinforces gendered social norms and where expertise with digital management is framed as a leisure or activity of interest. Notably, digital housework carried out by men does not significantly affect other forms of the labour that are performed in the household by women.

Extending these insights in contemporary Melbourne, this article attends to three different forms of digital housekeeping routines that reflect different scales and temporalities of moving, storing and shedding data that emerged during our interviews with households in Melbourne, Australia. As Pink et al. (2018) found for technologists in Melbourne and Barcelona, our participants reported a series of anxieties around data connected ‘to how people experience the realities of the messiness of digital data, their uncertainties about how data might be used or accessed in the future, and anticipation around its loss’ (p. 2). The ways that our participants described living with data implied that data were something that, like other domestic spaces and objects, needed to be managed, cleaned up or put in its place through organising, cleaning and clearing. Our participants thus focused upon three primary tasks for storing, sharing and circulating digital data: ‘digital tidying’, ‘spring cleaning’ and ‘moving house’.

As the primary context of personal, cultural and political assumptions, the home and household are laden with emotional meanings and symbolic resonances shape the meaning of movements of digital data (Bell and Dourish, 2007). Most of the practices of sharing or shedding data took place in shared spaces in the home: dining tables in open plan living rooms next to kitchens, home offices that were used by other members of the family and in lounge rooms. In these ways, personal devices are also intertwined with physical and emotional spaces of family life and practices reflected expectations of relative privacy between different members of the household (Longhurst, 2016). However, and as early work on the domestication of technologies demonstrated (Silverstone et al., 1992), domestic technologies (and content) are shaped by the broader worlds we inhabit and thus we need to account for the ways in which technologies navigate different ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai, 1988). In an age of global digital and media platforms, these regimes of value are often locally experienced through employers and other visible financial actors that shape people’s lives. Managers and bureaucratic processes, kinship and status hierarchies and a range of others who sit alongside transnational corporations and governments have the capacity to capitalise and, indeed, even monetise, these relationships. These different regimes of value subtly and not-so-subtly play a role in the ways in which people navigate their everyday practices of digital housekeeping.

Digital tidying

Households in Melbourne engaged in a digital housekeeping practice that we characterise as digital tidying. Digital tidying involves the routines of cleaning up the mess of data that is created on an everyday basis. Many of the daily routines of organising data were focused upon determining what to keep and where to store certain digital materials. At a pragmatic level, these involved decisions about what material to sync ‘in the cloud’ through services such as Dropbox or Google Drive, sorting inboxes and organising data such as pictures and videos into ‘folders’. Compared to the widespread acceptance of automatic platforms, one of the striking things about the households who participated in our study in Melbourne was the preference for the manual transferring of files. While some participants did rely upon automation to back up their phones and laptops which were then stored to sites such as iCloud or Samsung’s backup cloud, the ‘work’ of categorising, deleting and transferring between devices was largely manual. However, and unlike much of the discourse around trust of corporations around privacy in the data literature (Abed and Chavan, 2019; Hu, 2015; Lyon, 2014), participants noted that their practices were motivated by a desire to store and archive files in a way in which they could be accessed in the future.

Alongside maintaining control over the organising their digital files, the second routine involved organising their work and home life. For some of our participants, it was important to maintain a clear boundary between the two realms. Ben Taylor, for example, was a 35-year-old teacher who lived in inner-city Melbourne, who was married to Jasmine Menon. A migrant from the United Kingdom, Ben joined Jasmine in Australia and made the transition from being a high school teacher at a low-income school in the south of England to a teacher at one of the most expensive private schools in Victoria. One of Ben’s primary concerns was to keep his home life and interests private from his students to maintain the separation between work and home, not unlike the segmentation that Nippert-Eng (1996, 2008) has described for those working in industrialised settings and institutions like schools. Indeed, Ben was careful to use his work laptop for work activities and saved his home computer for his many leisure pursuits. Over our several visits to their household, Ben emphasised ‘neatness’ several times stating that, ‘I like things neat. I like things where I can find them and I like things predictable or making a pattern to things so that you know where things are going to be’. Ben’s orientation towards ‘neatness’ reinforces what work ranging from Mary Douglas and Elizabeth Shove have observed about the symbolic meanings of cleaning in the home; that notions of cleanliness also have moral value (Shove, 2003: 79). There is also a broader regime of value that shapes Ben’s practices – the educational setting in which he works.

Since moving to Australia and the highly regulated environment of education where Working With Children Permits and access to young people below 18 is policed by a variety of government agencies, he possesses a strong awareness of how ‘leaky’ data (Pink et al., 2017: 4) – or loose bits of information – could be used against him by students, parents, fellow teachers and administrators (Akiti, 2012; Davison et al., 2011; Erstad and Sefton-Green, 2013). The same bits of loose data could be used against him in an environment where teachers have been fired when pictures of them at parties or engaging in other activities have surfaced. Ben’s concerns were also shaped by a negative experience in the United Kingdom of a student finding out information about him on Facebook and Internet forums. As Ben explained,

When I was in the UK, a student sent me a text message and it was a pay-as-you-go phone and there’s absolutely no way they should have had my phone number. We were going on a school trip and I was on a separate bus and this kid sent me a message going, ‘How long till we arrive?’ She got my number off the internet and that was the part that was a little bit scary because the amount of information that people can find. I mean even – because immediately I started going, ‘Right, how on earth could you have found this?’ But it was from a web posting I had posted on a very obscure, very specific interest group and it was to do with sports and it was a very specific kind of historical sport which nobody should have – there’s absolutely no reason for that person should get it. I just Googled my own name and started clicking off and going, ‘Okay, I foolishly put my phone number there for somebody’, and that’s clearly where they got it. But having checked that, even just the open information that was available, so you could find out just through the electoral sheets who I lived with, exactly the address, the statistical demographic details of those other two guys [his housemates] were widely available.

For these reasons, Ben went to great lengths to be cautious about where he posted and also regularly reviewed his social media presence, so he was better able to control what students, teachers and others could and could not see. The sense of order that resulted from this constant vigilance also worked to reduce stress and worry about loose bits of information that could easily be accessed by others. By maintaining his teacher persona at all times, ‘tidying’ included monitoring what data were available about him. Ben also requested that Jasmine not share very much information about their lives as a couple on social media sites.

Whereas Ben’s vigilance about segmenting the personal and professional were tied to the highly surveilled educational context in which he works, 50-year-old Nigel Victor’s practices were informed by other concerns. Nigel lived with his 22-year-old daughter Mel in a warehouse apartment in one of Melbourne’s upmarket inner suburbs. He had worked in the film industry for over two decades and described himself as still being in a constant process of copying and transferring emails to an external hard drive. As Nigel explained,

It’s very important that I keep particularly my Outlook records. That’s why I don’t want to change my email system, because that works very well for me. And all the history’s on there . . . A lot of legal stuff, I need to keep those.

In addition to sorting a backlog of daily emails, backing up video footage was an essential part of Nigel’s job and a time-consuming activity. As he described,

The person taking the videos, I’ve just this week, I’ve got him to download everything, every single camera that he used, every single shot, onto a two-terabyte hard drive. So I keep everything on the hard drive as a backup, and then I bring them in to the Mac, and I probably duplicate them on another hard drive. So I’ve got a one terabyte and two terabyte. So I would keep the two terabyte as the master, and then bring stuff in to use, then I’d put it into the Mac when I’m creating the video clips, and then I delete them, so it doesn’t slow down the Mac too much, slow up the hard drive. So that’s my current system.

When backing up emails or videos, Nigel manually reviewed files copying or deleting as he went along. As he described,

When it works, when the machine does it and does it well, like, I’ve downloaded apps to try and sort these things out, and haven’t had much joy with it. So what I end up doing once I ended up actually going through and deleting – I had like 2,500, I ended up deleting hundreds of duplicates, because I couldn’t get rid of the duplicates. And that took me, I was lucky I was on a ship at the time, so I had time, but that took me two days to do that. I felt better about that, because I knew where it was and that, yeah, had been done. So, yeah, there’s not a distrust of technology, but I don’t rely on it 100%, yeah. So that’s why I would never keep all my notes in a phone.

Despite his familiarity and reliance on the digital in his livelihood, he was one of the participants who did not trust his devices to synch or back up automatically; rather, he preferred to go through each file or each batch of files himself, even if it was a lengthy process. Just as Pink et al. (2018) discovered in their work with those in the technology industry, Nigel did not see digital technologies and data as reliable or trustworthy and acknowledged that such technologies can easily fail or breakdown.

Interestingly, and perhaps because he has been in the film industry for so long, Nigel did not discuss how he managed the issue of presence bleed (Gregg, 2013). In fact, and not unlike what Horst (2012) found with young people whose parents worked from home in Silicon Valley, in cases where people could control the environment (such as by owning bedrooms or individual spaces), people who worked from home created designated spaces for work and were thus able to segment where they engage in work or leisure. In Nigel’s case, this was a cubby-like space near the stairs and due to this space, and perhaps the size of the equipment he worked with, work rarely bled onto the kitchen table or bedrooms as it might in other homes of creative workers. The exception was a rare occasion during a major project. As a result, for Nigel, the regime of value was far less institutionalised than we saw in the case of Ben and was really more about managing the regime of value associated with the family. As Nigel considered himself the key breadwinner and eldest person in the space, his accountabilities about managing data were to himself and the company that he had created.

Digital spring cleaning

The second set of practices involved periodic, but more thorough forms of sorting than the everydayness of tidying, what one might think of as digital spring cleaning. During digital spring cleaning, participants were focused upon decluttering digital data by disposing, editing, or other forms of curation. While both digital tidying and digital spring cleaning were future oriented, digital spring cleaning involved a more intentional form of imagining future uses and possibilities.

A notable example from our households of digital spring cleaning was Nancy Chan, a 53-year-old woman originally from Singapore. Nancy migrated to Australia and moved to the outer suburbs of Melbourne in the 1980s with Stephen who was a 58-year-old retiree. Not unlike Ben’s digital tidying practices, Nancy was focused upon tidying in her daily practice but was often motivated to routinely ‘spring clean’. As she summarised, ‘I like to clear things. That’s me I like to organise, well not organise, clear things’. A key example was her smartphone. Nancy was part of a couple of WhatsApp groups with relatives and friends in Singapore and they often post photos, memes and other images to the group:

But I clear that after a while, I don’t usually keep, let’s say greetings or whatever. After a while I tend to clear. My girlfriend sent this [shows picture], this is our old high school and what they’ve done is they’ve closed the school now and making it into a national design centre so there was an article about it, she sent us to read. It wasn’t like that before, it was very dark and dingy and air-con and I’m thinking wow. So things like that, so yeah, keep things like that basically. Then of course our family one, that one, they will post things which I delete anyway, like things that are important, health and things like this [shows photo].

These photos, which had immediate value, differed in quality from the photos that Nancy regularly transferred from her phone onto her Mac. She only kept photos on the phone that were sentimental, such as family photos or screenshots as reminders, but she deleted most of her photos once she had transferred them to her Mac and organised them in folders. At times she would ask her daughter for help managing these processes and thus her daughter had access to her account, but over time Nancy has gained confidence managing them on her own without assistance.

Nancy’s 19-year-old daughter Jessica also played a key role in this process. After returning from holidays, Jessica was always entrusted with transferring photos from the phone or digital camera to her Mac that Nancy used as well. Jessica organised photos by date and location of the different stops on their trip. She rarely deleted as she transferred and she kept all blurry or ‘bad’ photos, assuming that her mum would delete them. Jessica went through these photos occasionally, to reminisce about family holidays or to think about where to go next, but Nancy never browsed through the catalogued photos in the same way. Rather, when she went through photos, she continued to organise them. Part of the ritual of returning home in the months following a family holiday involved Nancy going through the folders Jessica had organised and deciding which few to print. For example, after a trip to the United States in 2016, Nancy created two framed collages of souvenirs, ticket stubs, signed photos and family photos taken on the phone and then printed from a visit to NASA (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Framed collage of printed images and souvenirs.

Printing digital photos was valued for being a sentimental artefact displayed in the home, and like souvenirs purchased, the photos symbolised significant places, times, things and experiences shared between the family (Kirk and Sellen, 2010). In their discussion of family photos, Haldrup and Larsen argue that one of the functions of holiday photos is they contribute to ‘the family gaze’ and captures how families see the world and themselves (Urry and Larsen, 2011). They further emphasise that holiday photos do more than keep records or document real experiences; they also ‘reveal more about the culture of imaginative families and idealised holidays than the people and places represented’ (Haldrup and Larsen, 2003: 28). Categorising and cataloguing digital images so they can be easily accessed became important where such intentions and motivations were present. But such photos differed in value and function from the more transient images that were deleted, for example, from Nancy’s phone. The deleted images reflected other forms of gift giving, whose circulation acknowledges and maintains relationships (Taylor and Harper, 2002; Van House et al., 2005). Villi (2012) has likened the circulation of digital photography to ‘visual chitchat’, ‘visual small-talk’ and ‘pictorial conversation’ (p. 42). The content and quality of these images were secondary to their function as communicative objects. The thousands of holiday photos kept for printing or for making into artefacts later illustrated the seemingly intangible nature of files and bytes. They did not appear to take up space, they could be archived and categorised for easy access and they may prove to be useful later in their sentimental value. The family Mac and the ‘sacred hard drive’ make up the family’s most invisible, yet intimate storage container for their memories and time spent together as a family.

Focusing more in the realm of entertainment and domestic sharing, 55-year-old Mike Harrison received a PlayStation 4 for Christmas in 2016, which influenced how he stored media and entertainment in the home he shared with his wife Dina and stepson, Jordan. Prior to the PlayStation 4, Mike was more of an enthusiast for online, networked games which he would play on his desktop in his study. Their home was also networked with highspeed broadband with unlimited downloads, which allowed Mike and Jordan to play networked games on their desktops at the same time. When Mike spoke about backing up to the cloud, he emphasised that he was not keen on storing his own information on somebody else’s computer:

We do use the cloud anyway. Any website – like, your emails, that’s in the cloud, because Hotmail, or whatever server, or Gmail server. Any website, or anything like that, like eBay or something like that where you keep your information, that’s the cloud, because all your information is on there . . . But what people think: you know, I just use the cloud and I download things, and I keep pictures and music and all other stuff so I can download it any time, I don’t use it for that.

Instead, Mike had set up a networked server within the home, which backed up most media files automatically so he, Dina and Jordan could access movies, music or games from any of their devices, anywhere in the house. Mike only backed up photos on his phone, and he would only do this when he noticed his phone storage was becoming full. He plugged the phone into his desktop and allowed it to automatically save photos to the desktop’s internal storage and by extension, the home server, deleting duplicate image files, freeing up storage on his phone. He explained,

The server itself actually is a proper server, so I could use it to back up all the computers if I wanted to, but that would take up a lot of storage, and it would also take up a lot of – because I’m on wireless, it would take up a lot of bandwidth. It would really, you know, clog up the system.

What we see in the case of the digital spring cleaning practices carried out by Nancy and Mike is that there is an intentional process of cataloguing particular photographs, music, movies and games as belonging to the ‘family’ rather than to the individual or to the device. In the case of Nancy, we see this through the demarcation of photos and other files on local drives and, for Mike, the ritual of moving files onto the family or household networked server was for collective consumption in the household. These were both viewed as disconnected from the files and other devices that could be available on the cloud, phones and other more shared servers.

Moving digital house

Moving digital house involved the shift or relocation of digital data from one device or service to another. To illustrate this final practice, we return to the household of Ben and Jasmine, but this time focus upon Jasmine’s storing and sharing practices. She moved back to Melbourne after working in a position as a telecommunications marketing manager based in London for 4 years. When Jasmine began her new position, she was given the option of purchasing a new laptop. She opted for a MacBook Air because her new colleagues all used Macs and she decided, ‘It was just kind of easier to get in sync with the workplace and what we were working on and then having sort of my previous position and my previous work on another device altogether’. After determining her old laptop, a Sony Vaio, was too old to return to circulation at her workplace in London, she was given the option to keep it which she eventually did. In fact, during her first few months of settling into the position, Jasmine described how she used both the Mac and her old laptop for different tasks: ‘I use different them for different things, I keep different data on them, and I back them both up in different ways’. Jasmine stored some of her work (that the company would let her keep) from her previous job in London on her Sony Vaio, along with photos she had taken, movies and music she had downloaded. Unlike Ben, Jasmine effectively transformed the former work laptop into her personal laptop as she settled into her new position.

Jasmine used the Mac for tasks assigned by her new workplace and she only backed up files she had been working from onto a hard drive once a fortnight. Rather than transferring all her files to the Mac’s substantial storage space, she only copied individual files if she needed them. For example, at the end of working on a document, she backed the files onto a USB stick kept in her handbag. Once a week or fortnight, she transferred these saved files onto a hard drive. Indeed, for the first 6 months in her new position, Jasmine retained the practice of going between the two laptops. In part this was because she felt more confident on a PC than a Mac and had to get used to the new operating system. She really only fully ‘migrated’ to the Mac when she needed to take the laptop on a work trip and needed to review files from her previous job. But rather than transfer those files through email or other mechanisms, she preferred to carry her portable hard drive that had everything saved from the Vaio, so she had her new device along with her old storage unit. At the time of our last interview in 2017, her Mac had become her primary work device and she only used the 5-year-old Vaio for entertainment purposes – for downloading and storing music and movies. The portable hard drive she used with the Vaio still contained her old work and all her entertainment, but she bought a new portable hard drive to manually back up her current position’s work from her Mac.

In this section then moving digital house involves the shift or relocation of digital data from one device or service to another, often in what is seen as a permanent way. Depending upon the age and functioning of the device or service, this includes changes in format to render digital data useful into the future, the realisation of lost data as well as an additional assessment of the value of moving such digital material (Lobato and Thomas, 2018; Sterne, 2006, 2012). Jasmine’s management of her new position in Melbourne offered a few ways of thinking about relocating digital data. First, there was the obvious instance of starting a job and acquiring a new device as offering the opportunity to establish new routines and re-establishing boundaries between home and work. Jasmine’s use of the Mac exemplified an exercise in segmentation where one device is representative of work (including learning how to use it) and another with leisure, home and entertainment. As her use of the Mac gradually increased, it also compelled a wider sense of integration where working from home also facilitated a spatial transition from her London-based job and her Melbourne-based one.

Second, Jasmine returned home to Melbourne after a period of time away, which facilitated an economic and geographic identity transition. Marcoux (2001a, 2001b) has described in his work on how moving and sorting through possessions becomes a process through which people evaluate their relationships to others, and the self, through objects. Similarly, Mehta and Belk (1991) argue that when migrants relocate, possessions are part of individual and collective identities which allow them to selectively transport part of their former identities into a new place. These transitional objects may provide an important aid to identity transition, bridging past, present and future. Selecting a Mac reflected Jasmine’s desire to fit in with her new workplace and colleagues, and also represented an identity shift associated with moving and acquiring a new job. The move towards integrating her personal and professional on her old laptop also worked to subsume this identity in London as part of her, but not one that currently defined her professional identity. Jasmine may have worked on the same or similar files, websites and documents, but the device on which she worked effectively determined the different ‘workplace’ and the new set of rules and identities associated with it.

Digital housework: making sense of digital mess

In our discussion of digital housekeeping, we have drawn parallels between notions of cleaning, storing and disposing with how people make sense of living with digital data at key points in time. As became evident in our participants’ lives, the home is a key site for defining relationships with different work and professional contexts, as well as different forms of leisure, ranging from sharing hobbies with friends and family to creating mementos associated with travel and family activities. Like homes, digital data must be organised and put in its place particularly for individuals who possess a desire for neatness and control. Yet even for those who keep what might be construed as a less tidy digital domain (filled with old files, photographs and conversations that do not necessarily have meaning beyond the transient moment), the desire to organise and sort on a more periodic basis represented an opportunity to re-orient oneself to other key relationships. And, of course, moving and acquiring new possessions also could be construed as an opportunity to re-constitute ones’ relationship to these objects. While there were clearly non-digital forms of engaging with these different relationships – ranging from clothing and bags to rooms filled with souvenirs and old devices – digital data are clearly as messy as other ‘harder’ – for lack of a better word – forms of material culture (Mehta and Belk, 1991).

Somewhat surprisingly – and certainly in contrast to what might be more typical experiences of digital data management – few of the participants in our study referred to organising their data as burdensome or a chore (Kennedy et al., 2015). Unless entire amounts of data had been lost or erased from damaged storage units such as corrupted hard drives or computers that have just ‘died’ and taken data with them, few of the participants in the study had negative feelings of loss with disposing of erroneous files or photos. The emotional attachment was stronger towards the devices and data which have had time invested into organising and transferring of files. Keeping data organised also reflected the moral value attributed to being tidy, suggesting that like material objects in a well-organised home, for some participants keeping digital material tidy allowed daily life to become easier (Dion et al., 2014; Shove, 2003). These regular practices also resonated with current trends of decluttering homes from excessive amounts of possessions through adopting approaches such as the KonMari Method in order to pursue more minimalist or simplified ways of living (Hsin-Hsuan, 2017; Löfgren, 2017). Perhaps, surprisingly, several participants spoke enthusiastically about the task of backing up or sorting through what to keep and what to throw away without emphasising the time they had to set aside or emphasising it was something they had to do regularly. This may reflect what Gregg (2013) describes as ‘function creep’, where the convenience of technologies also obscures the amount of additional work they demand.

However, not all members of a household were equally enthusiastic and there were certainly instances of particular household members taking on the responsibility for organising digital data. For some households, such as Ben and Jasmine, each member of the household managed their own data and devices and did not share passwords. In other homes, such as Mike’s where he managed the household’s entertainment system, passwords to devices or accounts were shared and Nancy’s household passwords to accounts and devices were shared out of necessity when help was needed. A cogent example of this emerged in the case of Amanda and Nerida, a same-sex couple in their late 20s who lived in suburban Melbourne. In their case, Amanda was the only one who liked to spend time managing the technology in the household, including both of their social media accounts. Nerida noted that she could not be bothered and even found it tedious to go through files and organise things, suggesting a digital division of labour now required in households. We also saw this in Jessica and Nancy’s household where Nancy focused on the curation of family photographs while her daughter Jessica preferred to take care of the initial organisation, happy to leave the curation of the family to her mother Nancy. Nancy’s husband, however, talked more enthusiastically about the devices to store data and the preservation of items such as DVD players that could continue to play family vacation DVDs. One of the aspects of this ‘division of labour’ around digital data housekeeping was the extent to which it was described more in terms of areas of ‘interest’ or ‘expertise’ than traditional analyses of domestic housework might suggest. For example, Ben and Jasmine were relatively egalitarian in the maintenance of household digital data. They monitored and managed their own movie, music and photographs and neither expressed an interest in sharing the organisation of these collections for the household. Rather, they shared photographs and curated together which photographs would be printed or made into albums. Their practice represented a distinct contrast to Amanda and Nerida’s practices where one partner assumed the management and maintenance of digital data. This was despite the similar amount of time the respective couples had been living together in the same household. Nancy’s more established family, by contrast, had fallen into distinctive roles and expertise with her husband more squarely occupying an interest in the technologies to document, retain and store digital data and her daughter’s role as the person with the know how to sort and organise photos. Moreover, Jessica was an adult living with her parents while attending university and did not challenge her mother’s preferences for deleting photos she had taken on their holidays. While Nancy’s husband made a few comments about why she wanted to save so much digital data, he also relished this as a personal challenge to learn more and better ways to find technology to store data. In contrast to family and household digital data, Nigel, Ben and Jasmine very rarely consulted others about what digital data to keep or delete, they did not share passwords and they did not rely upon each other’s expertise to manage the bulk of their digital data. The one exception for Ben and Jasmine was when getting a new computer for work (‘moving house’) and they shared ideas about the best way to maintain boundaries between home and work through their digital devices. In these examples, it could be argued that this is because the bulk of their digital data involved managing the boundaries between home and work life. They were also both about equally literate when it came to digital technologies. It could also be argued that their constitution as a household was, by comparison to Nancy’s family, very new and they did not yet have as many overlapping life experiences (such as children) to manage. It is also unclear how much of a role Nancy’s daughter might continue to play in the digital housekeeping of family memories once she leaves home or builds a family of her own. Moreover, Nigel might one day retire and develop different digital housekeeping practices and Amanda and Nerida may alter their roles and interests as their family evolves. In other words, it is possible that the dynamics in operation and the associated moral stances and ambivalence around digital housekeeping might change over time in relation to the different regimes of value that are operating in people’s lives.

Finally, while very few participants extensively discussed concerns about corporations and privacy in a pre-Cambridge Analytica era, many of the practices of privacy were constructed in relation to broader regimes of value in their lives, or what Lupton (2018) described as the agents who determined the value of digital data. This is perhaps most salient in the case of Ben whose livelihood could be threatened by a parent, student, administrator or others identifying what they might construe as inappropriate content or unsanctioned interactions between a male teacher and students. But it is also a key concern for Nigel whose process of segmenting and tidying is tied to the need to maintain order for billing, for clients and for his own portfolio and Jasmine’s concern to maintain her ‘work’ identity as separate to her personal one. In the case of Nancy, her role as the keeper or curator of family memory drives her periodic or seasonal bursts of organisation. ³ Importantly, the images and videos that were set aside for the rituals of archiving were stored on ‘local’ rather than what participants perceived as publicly owned platforms. In effect, the process of cataloguing and categorising enabled participants to extract their data and cut themselves from the network and regimes of value associated with currency and companies. In many ways – and as we hope these rather mundane but lived experiences of digital data highlight – it is worth reorienting many of the abstract debates about privacy through the ways in which people themselves manage different actors and draw connections between the prism of relationships between personal, public and digital or ‘big’ data.